Ancient Forest Question.

[PotatoOverdose]

I really dislike the idea of ancient forests downgrading into regular forests when not in FOL. It's hard to suspend disbelief on that.

Lots of things you could do instead to nerf the ancient forest spread:

1. Tie it to the guardian of nature civic rather than the religion. That ups the beaker cost on getting to ancient forests and prevents the tech paths that include a quick diversion to Way of the Forests before getting onto the real goal.

2. Put it into a spell. For instance, it could be that casting bloom on a regular forest turns it into an ancient forest. Remove automatic growth of ancient forests.

If you make the investment to get the ancient forest reward steeper, then that solves alot of the problems mentioned here.

See, I have two problems with ancient forests staying after you abandon the religion:
1. (Lore Related) Why should nature continue to help the civ in question after they've abandoned the way of nature? If you've stopped caring for nature, you should top benefiting from the fruits of that relationship.
2. (Balance Related) Ancient Forests are THE reason to go FoL. If you keep them after converting, you essentially get 90% of the benefit from the religion without actually adopting it. The main reason to go AV is for the units and the 1 civic. What if you kept those after switching religions?

Actually, heres a solution that doesn't require any downgrading/upgarding, keeps the ancient forests, solves a balance issue, and doesn't require any major sdk or c++ changes (I think).

Vale was on the right track with his first idea. Make ancient forests have exactly the same yield as regular forests. Make the guardian of nature civic give ancient forests +1 . You need the proper civic to maximize farms, so this has consistency with other aspects of the game. This essentially fixes the balance aspect and the lore aspect as well (those more attuned with the natural world will get better yields form it, those that are not do not receive the benefits).

 

[Ecofarm]

Vale was on the right track with his first idea. Make ancient forests have exactly the same yield as regular forests. Make the guardian of nature civic give ancient forests +1 . You need the proper civic to maximize farms, so this has consistency with other aspects of the game. This essentially fixes the balance aspect and the lore aspect as well (those more attuned with the natural world will get better yields form it, those that are not do not receive the benefits).

This works. Doesn't everyone think so? Sure, you have to wait a little longer to grow to pre-guardian happy caps (when you have happy to do so) (hidden paths is pretty expensive), but I think that is ok.

 

[Dunraven]

This works. Doesn't everyone think so? Sure, you have to wait a little longer to grow to pre-guardian happy caps (when you have happy to do so) (hidden paths is pretty expensive), but I think that is ok.

I think its a great idea. So much so that I've been trying to implement it in my own copy of FFH...the thing is, I can't figure out how to do it! I understand the XML moderately well, but after looking at both the features and the civics, I'm just not sure which tag I'd use to implement something like this. Any help would be greatly appreciated!