End Game Victories rebalance

[Gaia_]

Hi guys,

since I am setting the affinity requirements to 18 for Transcendence/Promised Land/Emancipation victories, I wonder how I should balance the non-affinity victories, since those would then become comparatively easy and quick.

Contact: I'm thinking to add some sort of hybrid affinity requirement. Maybe Lvl10 for all three? And/or increase the activation Energy requirement to 10,000 from 1,000 ... 1,000 really is nothing, and by increasing it that would also avoid the situation of super-fast wins when you're lucky with a ruin and get the Signal very early.

And what about domination? Should that be left untouched or would a 20% city strenght be in order?

Thanks for your opinions and input!

 

[Starrynite120]

Making Contact a sort of Hybrid victory seems to be a good idea to me. Otherwise its way too easy. You could also consider giving the beacon a tech requirement, that would definitely slow it down.

As for domination, I don't think increasing city strength is needed. You could do that if you wanted, but I think what's more necessary is a unit rebalance, since late upgrades increase unit strength too much.

 

[Gaia_]

Thanks a lot for your input. Requiring a tech is a brilliant idea and would fix the issue, but after further consideration I think that the intent was to make Contact an Energy releated victory as opposed to a Tech/Affinity related one. I have therefore opted to increase the Energy requirement to 10,000.

I think the original intent was lost somehow as a result of easily available energy in the late game. So I have made a mod that increases building energy maintenance in line with production cost since I think this was somehow an oversight.

Both mods are now on Steam: End Game Rebalance
Energy Tweaks

 

[Gaia_]

Most modders probably already know this, but after some testing I realize why Firaxis has not set the Affinity requirement to 18 to begin with: Mercury level AI only ever gets to Level 14 and only Gemini AI can win with Affinity 18.

Another issue is the inconsistency in End Game scaling for the different Victory types across Game Speeds: Promised Land and Emancipation always require the same 20 Earhtlings or 1000 Strenght units respectively. Beacon activation cost also doesn't scale and is constant at 1000 while the Time to Victory scales to 135 turns for the Beacon and Mind Flower on Marathon. This explains why it was set to 45 from 30 ... since on Quick Speed it used to be 20 turns (30 turns now) vs. the same 20 Earthlings.