I am considering some balance proposals for Authority, and I would like some thoughts and insights before I craft anything. As I am not a major warmonger, some of my concerns could just be biases.
Authority - A deep dive
Authority at its core serves as the "kill them and take their stuff" tree. It has a weaker economic engine than Tradition or Progress, and that is by design. Your focus with Authority should be aggression. You need to kill units and take cities to compensate for your weaker innate bonuses.
The Problems with Authority
When I use authority, I generally find the following are my biggest issues.
Change Ideas (I am placing these in order that they are normally taken in)
Opener
Old: +25% combat bonus versus barbarians, reveal barbarian camps. +1 prod per city. Gain culture when killing units and clearing barbarian camps.
New: +50% experience versus barbarians and city state units. Reveal barbarian camps. +1 prod per city. Gain culture when kill units.
Commentary: The idea here is to replace the barbarian combat bonus with an Xp boost that works on both barbarians and city state units. This gives you a way to level up your early units quickly, getting them ready for the "real fight" when its time to attack a civ (which also increases their value for tribute purposes). However, this ability is naturally limited because you cannot get higher than level 3 off of barbs and CS units, so it prevents abuse. Now you get your initial army ready quicker, but it doesn't have any scaling concerns into the mid game.
(NOTE: I believe CS units are also XP capped like barbarians, but I may be wrong here. If so, we would need to amend it)
Second, we are removing the barbarian camp culture bonus (in favor of a change to tribute below). Right now Authority players have a weird anti-synergy, where killing a camp prevents spawns to get more culture. Further, a lot of their early culture is too tied up in barbarian spawns, so we want to smooth out that curve. See below for more details.
Tribute
Old: Cities gain 20 gold and production when expanding borders, era scale. Gain 25% of tribute from city states as culture.
New: Cities gain 20 gold and production when expanding borders, era scale. Increase culture from unit kills by 50%.
Commentary: Right now there is too much swinginess for authority culture sources. If you don't have barb camps or city states nearby, you are simply screwed. However: Cities, barb camps, and city states all have 1 key thing in common....enemy units to kill. So by focusing the culture gains with unit kills, we smooth out the curve. As long as there are units from SOME source, you have a steady supply of culture to gain.
Imperium
Old: A free settler appears near the capital. Cities founded or conquered gain 40 science and culture, scaling with era and population.
New: A free settler appears near the capital. Cities founded or conquered gain 40 science and culture, scaling with era and population. Monuments give +1 happiness.
Commentary: Authority needs an earlier and more reliable source of happiness that works with an active moving army, not one just stuck in garrisons. This gives them that key need at the time when they need it.
Dominance - Unchanged
Militarism
Old: Each city with a garrison gives +1 happiness and +2 culture. -15% to Unit Maintenance, -50% to road maintenance.
New: Each city with a garrison gives 2 culture. -20% to unit maintenance. Gain a supply free unit when the city hits 5 population.
Commentary: We moved the happiness into imperium. We removed the road maintenance in favor of better unit maintenance as that tends to scale better with the larger army we are trying to produce (and helps us to field that police force we need for the culture). We also move the supply free unit here, but now its a single unit you get at 5 pop. The current one every 10 pop isn't all that useful. Most cities will only ever get 2 units from it, and that won't happen to much later in the game (when you already have nice big unit producing cities that can crank out units), whereas Authority wants to encourage earlier aggression at a time when your production is very low. By making it a single use at 5 pop, we give Authority a free unit when it really needs it, but we remove the scaler.
Honor
Old: +10% CS, free unit every 10 pop, -25% to war weariness.
New: +10% CS, -25% war weariness.
Commentary: We are stripping a few things from honor in favor of moving things earlier in the tree. Ultimately considering your getting your finisher at this point normally, the total package is still more than worth it.
Authority - A deep dive
Authority at its core serves as the "kill them and take their stuff" tree. It has a weaker economic engine than Tradition or Progress, and that is by design. Your focus with Authority should be aggression. You need to kill units and take cities to compensate for your weaker innate bonuses.
The Problems with Authority
When I use authority, I generally find the following are my biggest issues.
- Feast or Famine nature of the map: Authority's entire power lies on someone nearby to steal. City States to get tribute, barbarians to get culture, cities to take. If you get the right map, your a god. You tribute a culture CS and your swimming in early policies. You get 3 barb camps nearby and your feasting on culture for turns and turns. But other times, you have open ground. You found that one early barb camp, and then nothign. No city states in the area. Suddenly you are completely stuck in the mud. While tradition and progress have natural terrain that benefits them as well, neither of them are nearly as swingy as Authority. This to me is the number 1 problem with the tree.
- Happiness: As you are generally building more units and less infrastructure, you don't have as many per turn yields to help with unhappiness, and you often have early puppets from your conquests, happiness can be a real sore spot for Authority. While it has a happiness policy, it comes very late in the game and frankly works anathema to the playstyle Authority cultivates. Authority players want to be using their units, not holing them up in their cities.
- Early melee units suck at taking cities until they have promotions. While Authority has innate melee bonuses, early on melee units just do not perform well at the core role of taking cities until at least Drill II and especially City Assault. That is fine later in the game, but if your goal is early aggression and conquest....your stuck a bit high and dry.
Change Ideas (I am placing these in order that they are normally taken in)
Opener
Old: +25% combat bonus versus barbarians, reveal barbarian camps. +1 prod per city. Gain culture when killing units and clearing barbarian camps.
New: +50% experience versus barbarians and city state units. Reveal barbarian camps. +1 prod per city. Gain culture when kill units.
Commentary: The idea here is to replace the barbarian combat bonus with an Xp boost that works on both barbarians and city state units. This gives you a way to level up your early units quickly, getting them ready for the "real fight" when its time to attack a civ (which also increases their value for tribute purposes). However, this ability is naturally limited because you cannot get higher than level 3 off of barbs and CS units, so it prevents abuse. Now you get your initial army ready quicker, but it doesn't have any scaling concerns into the mid game.
(NOTE: I believe CS units are also XP capped like barbarians, but I may be wrong here. If so, we would need to amend it)
Second, we are removing the barbarian camp culture bonus (in favor of a change to tribute below). Right now Authority players have a weird anti-synergy, where killing a camp prevents spawns to get more culture. Further, a lot of their early culture is too tied up in barbarian spawns, so we want to smooth out that curve. See below for more details.
Tribute
Old: Cities gain 20 gold and production when expanding borders, era scale. Gain 25% of tribute from city states as culture.
New: Cities gain 20 gold and production when expanding borders, era scale. Increase culture from unit kills by 50%.
Commentary: Right now there is too much swinginess for authority culture sources. If you don't have barb camps or city states nearby, you are simply screwed. However: Cities, barb camps, and city states all have 1 key thing in common....enemy units to kill. So by focusing the culture gains with unit kills, we smooth out the curve. As long as there are units from SOME source, you have a steady supply of culture to gain.
Imperium
Old: A free settler appears near the capital. Cities founded or conquered gain 40 science and culture, scaling with era and population.
New: A free settler appears near the capital. Cities founded or conquered gain 40 science and culture, scaling with era and population. Monuments give +1 happiness.
Commentary: Authority needs an earlier and more reliable source of happiness that works with an active moving army, not one just stuck in garrisons. This gives them that key need at the time when they need it.
Dominance - Unchanged
Militarism
Old: Each city with a garrison gives +1 happiness and +2 culture. -15% to Unit Maintenance, -50% to road maintenance.
New: Each city with a garrison gives 2 culture. -20% to unit maintenance. Gain a supply free unit when the city hits 5 population.
Commentary: We moved the happiness into imperium. We removed the road maintenance in favor of better unit maintenance as that tends to scale better with the larger army we are trying to produce (and helps us to field that police force we need for the culture). We also move the supply free unit here, but now its a single unit you get at 5 pop. The current one every 10 pop isn't all that useful. Most cities will only ever get 2 units from it, and that won't happen to much later in the game (when you already have nice big unit producing cities that can crank out units), whereas Authority wants to encourage earlier aggression at a time when your production is very low. By making it a single use at 5 pop, we give Authority a free unit when it really needs it, but we remove the scaler.
Honor
Old: +10% CS, free unit every 10 pop, -25% to war weariness.
New: +10% CS, -25% war weariness.
Commentary: We are stripping a few things from honor in favor of moving things earlier in the tree. Ultimately considering your getting your finisher at this point normally, the total package is still more than worth it.
per kill for Authority works fine, IMO. The whole point of picking Progress is for tech leads and infrastructure. Making Authority on par with Progress on techs just sounds like an unnecessary buff to warfare which is already the META by a large margin.
