Full Patch Notes for December Patch

[LAnkou]

a reflexion i just had:

In cIV, happiness and health mattered at the beginning, but in the end game, if you had enough ressources, it was merely a joke. The only thing that prevented you from settling an infinite number of cities was the maintenance cost.

In ciV, gold is managed differently. No more city maintenance, but building maintenance (you can have a really big city, and it won't cost you anything if the goverment decide to build nothing there and a very small city with a ton of governement buildings that will cost you heavily-> logic to me). With the disparition of the city maintenance, the limiting factor of expansion disappeared too.
With the mix of global/local happiness, i see several consequences:
-you now have a limiting factor to expansion: when you are at 2 happy, you may decide to settle another city, but when you're -8, not so sure...
-happiness is a factor all along the game: even late game big cities will have to monitor their happiness/unhappiness ratio
-New late game cities won't have this ridiculously +15 happy you had at the foundation in cIV because of all resources you had. New cities will be in net unhappiness.
-there will be two kind of happiness: local (buildings) and global (ressources, wonders, game level) +/- the modifiers (SP/FP). the global happiness will help to fill in for the cities which lack local.
-depending on the question if each building is capped or the total building is capped will make a great difference in the gameplay: if each building is capped (city of 2 citizens => col and theater give 2 each) a city can be in net happiness (and ICS still happiness positive). If the global is capped (col+theater gives a total of 2 happiness), ICS is not happiness positive anymore.
-I note that after the patch, the total happiness via building is 14 + 2 (4 from col + 5 from theater and stadium + 2 optionnal from circus) when it was 12 + 3 before. If you think about the "circus maximus" thing, and all other changes to happiness (Golden Age and revolt). I'm sure that it's the total of happiness provided by buildings that will be capped.
-so there is local happiness that is used for number of citizen unhappiness (local)
-there is global happiness that will be used for global unhappiness (explaining the changes to FP and meritocracy - since both together eliminate all global unhappiness)

conclusion: each city should sustained the good buildings for its pop unhappiness (except beyond 14/16) while ressources, wonders and others will be used to sustain number of city unhappiness.

comments: some new things will appear to deal with number of city unhappiness (more ressources trade, ressources war, new strategies with some others happiness SP - the one giving one more happy by ressources, the one dealing with specialist, etc...). But basically, big huge large ICS empire is over because of happiness. I wonder how it will work on large and huge map.

If it's that hard to have enough sources of "global happiness" in the game, a good idea would be to have some happiness city state giving 1/2 happiness for being friendly/allied evolving in 3/6 in the late game (Buenos Aeres, Doha, Amsterdam, Bali, Auckland, Djerba - cities where there is fun even if Djerba and Bali are technically islands)

 

[Folket]

When will we get hotseat?

 

[marekb]

When will we get hotseat?

In a future patch.

 

[Seek]

blaaaaarg. Well so much for that. Although at least the forbidden palace nerf is a good thing.

So Honor looks even more tempting for large empires as it got an indirect buff - Military Caste is unchanged. Whether that's better than going for Theocracy may make for interesting decisions.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Now, what sort of buildings do we have in the early/mid part of the game that are attractive? As it is, only libraries, markets, colloseums were useful.

I might have been dangerously too close from the edge of a relentless Unhappiness disaster often at times, but i rarely built any Colosseums in most of my cities. Possibly cuz i enjoy setting these indirect challenges for myself during games.

Nerfing anything may be gameplay breakers to some while others prefer adapting their winning strategies to whatever ruleset offered in a new patch. Again, this is all caused by Balance control which is *extremely* difficult to achieve in such an highly variable context.

 

[Geek113377]

1--Disband obsolete units even if not losing money.
2--Only allow one upgrade per unit from a goody hut.
3--Add second embarkation promotion ("Defensive Embarkation").
4--Promotions must be picked the turn they're earned.
5--Players must now always adopt Policies immediately, and cannot defer picking until later.

1-Why? Having an old army is better than having no army!
2-GOOD! No more ancient-era riflemen
3-Doesn't this dull down the advantage of being Songhai?
4-That's stupid--Promotions should be able to be saved until you can see what you're up against!
5-Same as #4

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Really balance decisions should just be left to the mods.

No way, Jose!
If anything, Devs should always be considered at the pinnacle of a standardized Balance system. Blame Chaos_Theory (and not Law!) for all the remaining issues of whatever gameplay situations. They all either become effective together or result in a total wreck. Black/White effect, no approximate grays there.

 

[ohioastronomy]

Is there any discussion about balancing different speeds and map sizes? It looks as if they're moving to flat benefits/penalties per civ rather than per city, for example; this plays out very differently on small and large maps.

Put another way: will it be possible, at all, to run a large empire with many cities on a huge map? Or will such a setup face exactly the same mechanical constraints as a small one on a small map?

 

[Zyxpsilon]

I understand how; I do not understand why.

One more chance for the weak to somehow escape from the next fatal hit by a newly promoted enemy perhaps?

 

[Zyxpsilon]

And then, it seems that some of the happiness buildings are essentially now not happiness granters but unhappiness removers (if extra citizen =1 unhappy, and benefit capped at # of citizens then essentially it can only remove unhappiness).

Well said... but doesn't it seem obvious to you or anyone else (now that you've all seen the above interpretation by da_Vinci) that micman has just taken a huge positive blast right where it needed to be?!?

 

[Louis XXIV]

1-Why? Having an old army is better than having no army!

Probably to get rid of the Blanket of Death. The AI on high difficulties will still build lots of units, just not to the point of tedium.

3-Doesn't this dull down the advantage of being Songhai?

Depends on if they can get it too.

 

[lschnarch]

Probably to get rid of the Blanket of Death. The AI on high difficulties will still build lots of units, just not to the point of tedium.

Assuming the AI to make use of the same military advisor as we do ("build more military units to defend our cities") I see a vicious circle at the horizon:
1) get rid of a unit
2) wahhhh! Too less units! Build unit
3) wahhhh! Too much units! Abolish unit
4) back to 2)

 

[incool]

What is a GS? And what does it mean to "factor it into flavors"?

 

[Rahka]

Didn't find this on the first few pages....so will existing saves still be playable or corrupted after the patch? aka do I need to hurry up my epic game....

 

[Celevin]

Is there any discussion about balancing different speeds and map sizes? It looks as if they're moving to flat benefits/penalties per civ rather than per city, for example; this plays out very differently on small and large maps.

Put another way: will it be possible, at all, to run a large empire with many cities on a huge map? Or will such a setup face exactly the same mechanical constraints as a small one on a small map?

I have this concern about Tradition. That branch would be very powerful on small maps, and very weak on large maps. They could have solved this by giving it bonuses that big cities would want, like "+20% growth in all cities". Sure a large empire could use it, but it's mainly meant for growing big cities.

Other stuff like bonuses for having wonders would also be welcome, especially with the addition of more National Wonders.



Looking over the patch notes again, Egypt just went to near tier 1 in my books. Their UB still remains as one of the best, and with the addition of 2 more National Wonders (both of them amazing), they got quite a big buff. I don't know if they can possibly beat France or China, but it's close!

Also, Babylon got knocked down quite a few notches. Poor Babylon.

 

[bryanw1995]

I really hope that modders can do something with rebels now that they're in.

something along the lines of: more unhappiness increases the chances and number of rebels appearing.

If modders don't do something with rebels, I fear we simply won't ever see them; unless the player intentionally ignores happiness. It's great that rebels are in; unfortunate that we'll never see them or even have to worry about them.

rebels look like they were largely implemented to get rid of the "ignore happiness" exploit that good players used on lower levels. -33% isn't that bad when you have an era tech lead and very highly promoted units + GG. An easier fix would have been to pregressively increase the military penalty, say -10% for each additional -10 happiness or something similar.

I like valkarion's "dark ages" concept, maybe they could make the rebels come about from a dark age instead. that would be a great reason to keep happiness long-term under tight control!

 

[Zyxpsilon]

What is a GS? And what does it mean to "factor it into flavors"?

Great Scientists. As long they're in they still can hurry key_Techs completion by a sizeable chunk.

 

[Zyxpsilon]

Didn't find this on the first few pages....so will existing saves still be playable or corrupted after the patch? aka do I need to hurry up my epic game....

I doubt it... but one never knows what miracle devs have in store for us.

 

[bryanw1995]

I think you misunderstood Slowpoke's post, he meant that modders can change the revolt threshold from -20 to -1, so revolts happen more often.

Btw I wonder what happens when the rebels take a city (especially an unrazable one).

interesting. hopefully they'll form a "new" america/england/russia/etc. should be fun to find out!

 

[bryanw1995]

Err, Tradition got heavily buffed, and only one policy in Liberty got nerfed (and not by all *that* much as your capitol is easily your best production city at that point anyway).

no, meritocracy was also nerfed. with sp's they're forcing you to take something (possibly 3 or more) from the earlier, generally less-useful social policy trees. liberty was, by far, the most useful for non-warmonger games, while honor obviously is the warmonger's paradise. liberty's settler bonus is at a minimum quite reduced, especially for later expansion after the first wave when you're actually building important units/buildings/wonders in the capitol and don't want to switch to settler spam. meritocracy is unknown at this point, but an easy assumption would be 1 happy face for every 2 cities. it would still be very useful in light of the pop limited happiness buildings, just less so. the honor tree and warring general was slightly nerfed in many areas, but the total hit will be quite large. 10% flatland penalty vs 33%, only 10% for flanking, 10% for adjacent units, +50% instead of +100% exp for military tradition (so 7 exp instead of 10 for attack, really a 60% reductions in many cases). combat is really going to change dramatically imho. and tradition just plain sucked unless you were wonder spamming and/or expected to get invaded a lot. now I think that the early policies will be much more situational, you might actually see early warmongers or rex'ers go tradition instead of honor/liberty.