BeBa - Beyond Balance

Specialists have now been buffed. They give +3 to their primary yields instead of +1 and also give +1 to a secondary yield to make them less useless. (Scientists are the exception, as science is always useful). I think that if this isn't enough, I'll add more specialist slots to earlier buildings, but that might be a step too far.

Affinity leveling has been changed to give players more choice early on while delaying affinity victories which come far, far too early. No doubt this will just make contact more appealing for now but that'll be dealt with too, eventually. ;)

Here's some graphs for comparison:

Spoiler :
 
First off I'm really glad to see someone tackling this and I'm glad to see you trying to pursue this in the same vein as communitas.

Can I weigh in on my thoughts on trade?

1. Extend the number of turns they are active by 75-100% to cut down on constantly needing to manage them (or if possible make them permanent until canceled?)

2. For the internal routes (really the only ones that are a problem) actually have them MOVE hammers and food. If the destination recevied 8 food 8 hammers but the sender lost 6 food 7 hammer. That's a net of 2 food 1 hammer over all. This would still allow you to push a brand new city or rush a wonder but it would avoid the problem that we're having right now that a trade route can net +25 food and +25 hammers (split between 2 cities) making it the single strongest improvement by an order of magnitude above everything else.

3. Have them move trade food and culture rather than hammers.

And on another note have you guys looked at adding or changing some of the tile yield techs? Being able to add +1 food to farms (through the wonder) +1 food and +1 energy (one tech) +1 hammer (different tech) and +1 science all to farms makes farms by far one of the best tile improvements. If feels like some of those bonuses should be dispersed to other types of tile improvements. It's really hard to justify building domes or factories or any of the tile improvements that require maintenance when with a few techs farms far out shine them.
 
Long time lurker, registered to say I like what your doing with this so far.

Think the base 3 yield on specialists is important so growers aren't worthless.

Rather than the +1 off yield as a base though, just wanted to comment that it may be worth buffing both specialists and wonders simultaneously by adding a bunch of +1/+2 <1 yield> to <1 specialist> on a lot of the weak wonders.
 
sresk said:
First off I'm really glad to see someone tackling this and I'm glad to see you trying to pursue this in the same vein as communitas.

Can I weigh in on my thoughts on trade?

1. Extend the number of turns they are active by 75-100% to cut down on constantly needing to manage them (or if possible make them permanent until canceled?)

2. For the internal routes (really the only ones that are a problem) actually have them MOVE hammers and food. If the destination recevied 8 food 8 hammers but the sender lost 6 food 7 hammer. That's a net of 2 food 1 hammer over all. This would still allow you to push a brand new city or rush a wonder but it would avoid the problem that we're having right now that a trade route can net +25 food and +25 hammers (split between 2 cities) making it the single strongest improvement by an order of magnitude above everything else.

3. Have them move trade food and culture rather than hammers.

And on another note have you guys looked at adding or changing some of the tile yield techs? Being able to add +1 food to farms (through the wonder) +1 food and +1 energy (one tech) +1 hammer (different tech) and +1 science all to farms makes farms by far one of the best tile improvements. If feels like some of those bonuses should be dispersed to other types of tile improvements. It's really hard to justify building domes or factories or any of the tile improvements that require maintenance when with a few techs farms far out shine them.
Click to expand...

I agree with this, especially the farm tile improvements, what were they thinking by adding all those bonuses to one specific tile instead of spreading them out with all the others.
 
I have been trying to find anything about trade route formula to see if I can tweak it, but no luck so far. Can you point me in the right direction?

What I really want to do is add pretty harsh trade route penalties for negative health. This would make them pretty mediocre for wide empires (that have a lot of them) unless they put effort into health. Meanwhile, smaller empires can get more benefits out of them (but they have less). And, it makes sense. People don't want to travel when they might spread disease.
 
Would the author be willing to upload a mirror for the download? Steam has been acting weird lately, and I can't seem to get the mod to work.
 
There is a pretty popular mod on the workshop that extends trade routes from 25 turns to 80, it alleviates part of the issue with trade routes not being able to auto repeat.

Any plans to include that with BeBa balance? Would that negatively impact the game at all?
 
Ryika said:
I think 1 Trade route is perfect. That way, they really matter, without making the game evolve around them. 2 would still be too many for my taste. One problem I still have with trade routes are stations - they just can't compete with midgame-cities and thus are still very useless.
Click to expand...

A good solution for stations would be to increase the number of levels. Their yield is fine in the early game, their problem is later on. Adding more levels would make them naturally scale up with other options.

Also it would make the investment in one station more important. Right now I often trade first then raze them to plop down a city.
 
Acken said:
A good solution for stations would be to increase the number of levels. Their yield is fine in the early game, their problem is later on. Adding more levels would make them naturally scale up with other options.
Click to expand...

I agree with you but there would have to be a mechanic to prevent the station from advancing too quickly. Mybe you need to complete 2 or 3 trade routes before upgrading Tiers

On a separate note, I don't know how feasible this is but I feel like the aliens don't get aggressive fast enough. I was playing as supremacy and wiped out two nests along with like 10 or so Wolf Beatles and a siege worm within a span of 10-20 turns and the aliens never even turned orange... Is it possible to increase their escalation to aggression?
 
Found a knock on problem with nerfing trade routes down to only 1 per city.
Industry Virtue tree - Profiteering - +0.5 health per trade unit.

If we are decreasing the number of traders by slightly more than half, this health bonus needs to go up to at least 1 per trader.

Well I 'think' I added it myself in the mean time :)

-- Default: 50 (0.5)
UPDATE Defines
SET Value = '100'
WHERE Name = 'HealthPerTradeRouteTimes100';
 
It's a bit painful to see this mod appearing just 2 days after release to hotfix the issues Firaxis didn't notice... but I suppose creating a community-supported pseudo-patch is the best way to show them how to do things right.

First off, with the increased affinity level cost, is it even possible to reach max affinity without leveling the might tree?

With the trade routes, I would say 1 is way too low. How about leaving depot at 1, but giving the +1 back to autplant (or any other building/tech of your choice). I would even say that getting a 3rd trade route at a dedicated lategame tech (leaf, preferably) would be fully justified, given the internal trade routes are already nerfed.
As well, why did noone yet mention the Alternative Markets virtue? It adds 40 energy per turn to all sea trade routes to tier 3 stations and can be achieved before turn 100, causing an economic spike that just feels wrong. I even used station trade routes lategame, because even power-growing cities cant compete with the several hundred energy I got from that virtue (imho).

The wonders are, imo, a complete mass and need a rework all across the board. We got stuff like the Ecto Pod, which even the AI knows to priorize, and then stuff that just gives a +4 yield like some building. The only reasonable way of using most wonders seems to be combining it with the Knowledge virtue that gives +7culture per wonder. Which in itself is grossly overpowered if all wonders were to be useful, thus that needs to be adjusted, too.

As well, I have only gone into shallow water regarding CIV modding before, but how much influence can you take on the AI? Because I still think this is the most important issue. It keeps ignoring civilian units passing by their army at war, but is too dumb to even send a single unit to defend their colonist driving through my territory (AT WAR!).


Anyways, I've got a long list of possible bugs and suggestions, but I would wager most of them aren't able to be solved with mods. If you're interested nontheless, tell me and I can forward it to you.
 
Well the mod do slow down the affinity gain which are good.
However the game is still all about expansion, basicly the bigger you get the stronger you get, of even in the short term.

I suggest science cost per city increase to 10%-15% and culture cost to like 30%.

Growing cities is way to expansive, like growing from pop 12-13 cost like more then a colonist, and becuase expansion is so good their is little of interest of growing your cities.

I suggest you give specialist, if possible a % modifier of like 10% in their respective yield, only large cities would really be able to use this bonus to their advantage.

Dome improvement should give 3 culture to keep it up with other advanced improvements, nodes and arrays should be looked at to.
 
Alblaka said:
With the trade routes, I would say 1 is way too low. How about leaving depot at 1, but giving the +1 back to autplant (or any other building/tech of your choice). I would even say that getting a 3rd trade route at a dedicated lategame tech (leaf, preferably) would be fully justified, given the internal trade routes are already nerfed.
As well, why did noone yet mention the Alternative Markets virtue? It adds 40 energy per turn to all sea trade routes to tier 3 stations and can be achieved before turn 100, causing an economic spike that just feels wrong. I even used station trade routes lategame, because even power-growing cities cant compete with the several hundred energy I got from that virtue (imho).
Click to expand...

I think if you push the trade routes back up to two or three per city, you go back to the problem, there are still too many of them, and wide empires become imbalanced.

A compromise might be to give the capital extra slots. The Australasian/Polynesian leader already has two extra in the capital. Bump that up to four, and give every other civ two. Other than that, the way trade works in BeBa is really good I think.
 
lordrune said:
Other than that, the way trade works in BeBa is really good I think.
Click to expand...

I've been playing the mod all today and agree, trade is good without being OP at the moment.

A buff to profiteering and maybe interdependence networks is all trade needs.

Alternative markets was OP, but seems okay with the reduced number of routes.
 
Fantastic work so far!

A couple of things that have bugged me so far:

Explorers could use a bit of a strength buff so they're not quite so easy for the aliens to one-shot - perhaps up to 5?
I think keeping them with a single expedition to start with is better though - makes more interesting trade-offs with Supremacy 1 and laboratories and the pathfinders virtue, and keeps them around longer so that nabbing them is more about focusing on them and less about luck.

The Purity 1 bonus is crazy powerful and easy to exploit. I would suggest switching the Purity 1 and Purity 3 bonuses.

Maybe it bugs me more than it should, but it seems crazy to me that something as fundamental and universal as Clear Miasma is in a Harmony-boosting tech. Ideology- and gameplay-wise, Harmony should be the least associated with removing miasma. I would suggest moving this to a neutral tech - my first thought would be Biochemistry. It would also make a much better gameplay choice, I think - Harmony and workers ignore miasma, or non-Harmony and deal with miasma, but painfully. (However, I suspect the reason they're both together is that the AI can't handle it otherwise, and would keep killing its workers).
 
Some other suggestions:

Holomatrix should give 20% culture instead of slowing intruge down, it would make it quite a bit more useful as a culture satellite and would give a rare culture %.

Lasecom satellite should be turned into a science satellite, 1 science on each tile, 20% in cities, while purity and supremecy would need the more advanced deep space telescope satellite, forcing them to get more techs.

Franco-Iberia could be give a 25% culture to science bonus instead of free techs, it would allow them the same playstyle however that would remove powerful beelines.

Brazilia should be given 20% to both ranged and melee units or a production/resource bonus

Africa could be give health for each number of people in a city, fits rest of the ability.

Poly could be given a rushbuy discount.

KP could be given health from each city.
 
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