[Modular Modmodmod] Keepers of the Holy Places

[lemonjelly]

Now trying a converted version

I really think some of the bonuses need to be tuned down though.

 

[lemonjelly]

How would you turn it to a rubber band mechanism?

 

[DonQuigleone]

In truth, because all of these cities will be maintenance free, they don't need to pay for themselves. The main thing they need is a modicum of self defense. I think that all such cities should only get free defensive units ("pilgrim defenders"), these units should have some mechanism that makes them primarily defensive (perhaps they lose strength more then X tiles away from a UF, this means that you can use these units to defend settlers who go nearby, but not become a part of an invasion army. Additionally to perhaps to keep you from creating too much a boom, you might change it so that settlers can only go to a UF in the capital(which makes it less exponential), in addition Tithes would only need to provide food and Metal, whose benefits are non-transferable to your central cities.

Also I think it may be better for the Elohim to be more of a "central empire with branches at UFs" rather then entirely spread out, so perhaps a mechanism whereby you need a certain number of cities to get a pilgrimage would work out well.

Another way to get such cities to prosper would be to mod all the unique features to provide bonus resources on the tile, or perhaps only to the Elohim. I definitely don't think the tithe should be proportional to the number of UFs owned as this makes it waaay too exponential. It should either be constant, or proportional to something else unrelated.

 

[Pazyryk]

@DonQuiglleone. I take your balance points very seriously. I have a different objective here on the "flavor" side, however.

"central empire with branches at UFs". This is not the way they are in my imagination. You can point at a place on the Earth map and say, "this is Scotland" or "this is the Scottish homeland." You can do that for all other civs in FFH. But the Elohim are different. They are found anywhere, but no one in Erebus can really say where they are from. Their homeland is everywhere and nowhere.

So the mod will always encourage dispersion over growing a central empire, although I want to leave some flexibility, and getting the right balance is tough (I probably need to eliminate multiplier effects).

 

[hbar]

Would it be possible to have the tithe increase with worse terrain? So the desert and ice cities would get enough food through tithes to be a reasonable population, but the grassland Yggdrasil city won't get inundated with loaves and fishies?

I really like this idea, but food is the most powerful resource in Civ, so it must be doled out carefully.

 

[Kalina]

"central empire with branches at UFs". This is not the way they are in my imagination. You can point at a place on the Earth map and say, "this is Scotland" or "this is the Scottish homeland." You can do that for all other civs in FFH. But the Elohim are different. They are found anywhere, but no one in Erebus can really say where they are from. Their homeland is everywhere and nowhere.

Are you sure ? I'm not very good with FFH lore, but I think they were order who was accepted in one realm and is protected by them. Ethne is descendant from this royal line and Einion is leader of the order.

 

[Pazyryk]

@hbar, I've been thinking along those lines, but I'm hesitant to develop a mechanism that rewards bad city placement. Perhaps tithing could be somewhat adaptable to the cities needs.

@Kalina, not sure at all. Just my own imagination.

 

[hbar]

But it would only reward bad city placement if that city had a UF in the BFC, right? So for the Elohim, that's good city placement.

 

[Valkrionn]

The Elohim were INITIALLY as Pazyryk states. They coalesced during the later Age of Magic and the Age of Winter, however, so in the Age of Rebirth it would either be a central empire, or what DonQuigleone said.

 

[Pazyryk]

Well, Kael's descriptions ("Keepers of the sacred shrines" and so on...) sounded present tense to me. Not something they only did in the distant past.

 

[Valkrionn]

Well, Kael's descriptions ("Keepers of the sacred shrines" and so on...) sounded present tense to me. Not something they only did in the distant past.

It's not. They coalesced out of necessity, not any real desire to. A group of far flung shrine guardians couldn't survive the Age of Ice.

 

[Pazyryk]

I may need to defer to the lore masters here. Do I have any wiggle room at all? Do they have any current affinity for UFs at all?

 

[Valkrionn]

I may need to defer to the lore masters here. Do I have any wiggle room at all? Do they have any current affinity for UFs at all?

You have plenty of wiggle room. And they have lots of affinity for it. I'm of the opinion that they wouldn't remember exactly where the UF's are, and am tempted to remove that, but that's just opinion.

I DO think they should be encouraged to have one central place, a redoubt to fall back to, but otherwise what you have works in the lore just fine.

 

[DonQuigleone]

@DonQuiglleone. I take your balance points very seriously. I have a different objective here on the "flavor" side, however.

"central empire with branches at UFs". This is not the way they are in my imagination. You can point at a place on the Earth map and say, "this is Scotland" or "this is the Scottish homeland." You can do that for all other civs in FFH. But the Elohim are different. They are found anywhere, but no one in Erebus can really say where they are from. Their homeland is everywhere and nowhere.

So the mod will always encourage dispersion over growing a central empire, although I want to leave some flexibility, and getting the right balance is tough (I probably need to eliminate multiplier effects).

Obviously different ways work differently, what I'd like to see, that would be interesting would be perhaps instead of cities everywhere, many nodes of cities, IE the city at the UF at the center with satellite cities. This would make for interesting gameplay, I think. A few points generally:

1. I got one settler teleported to an Island near, but in no way able to get Aifon Isle in it's radius. I think perhaps sea features should be omitted, or at least this bug resolved.

2. UFs that are owned by other civs should be deprioritized.

3. Being able to do it with your initial settler may be too powerful, it essentially gives you a "reroll" of your starting location.

4. Perhaps delaying the ability to establish these outposts until either a certain technology or until you've established a beginning base of 3-4 cities(depending on size) might be better.

5. The fact you get a free strength 4 unit (who can be easily brought up to 5 and then to a monk) is very overpowered. You can essentially just keep pumping out settlers with abandon, gaining cities without doling out any military support, toning this down a bit would be good.

6. The losing 80% of gold from trade is pretty big, Trade is a huge segment of mid-to late game income, so Elohim might be fatally weakened in late game. Also they probably don't need the food that much either (unlike the Malakim who have a similiar mechanic).

7. If you just use pilgrimages for all your initial cities you also have far lower maintenance further enabling booming behaviour.

8. Perhaps spots next to large stacks of barbarians should have a lower priority?

9. Usually you get placed 2 tiles away from the UF, perhaps the spot it chooses should be weighted to be 1 tile away (IE next to the UF, where possible)

10. As a religious civ, it would be best to find a way to prevent religions being founded in the far off settlements, maybe favoring more established cities (this is an issue that might also effect the austrin, but they don't have a religious emphasis like the Elohim).

11. Perhaps UFs closer to home should be prioritized over UFs on the other side of the world.

12. Perhaps UFs with higher yields (like Yggdrasil or Remnants of Patria), or "good" unique features(like Tomb of Sucellus as opposed to broken sepulcher) should also be prioritized.

13. Perhaps there should be some kind of delay from when you cast the spell and they arrive, maybe 5 -10 turns.



I'll give a few alternative models of my own devising:

1. Cities established at UFs are less powerful: they only work the 1st ring, produce no great people (in many ways a positive) can produce settlers, but not sirona pilgrimages. Perhaps a more limited selection of buildings or culture. Don't produce any maintenance. Can be converted to a normal city if you like. More defensible and less of a burden on central administration, but produces less resources. From a flavour perspective this would also be in keeping with idea of small isolated monasteries all over. Not bustling cities! They also will be less of a threat to other Civs(and less annoying if one spawns next to you!).

2. If the ability to make these pilgrimages is delayed to the early midgame or midgame, the exploitability of this will be lessened. However there are different arrangements:

i. All available at X time, simply switches on.

ii. Tied to development of religious buildings. Perhaps you gain 1 convoy for every abbey you own (note a abbey requires 4 shrines of sirona). If a pilgrimage city gets destroyed you get another one.

iii. Staggered by general civ size. Say you start with 1 available, then you get a second at size 4, a third at size 6 a fourth at size 8 and then infinite after that.

iv. You get Free settlements, staggered in some way, this means that you can expand from your initial base AND have no reason not to get settlements at the UFs

3. However if delayed until the early midgame this might result in all the UFs being taken by AI before you get any chance to found one of these. One way to handle this would be for the Unique features to all have guardians, which the Elohim could have an easier time dealing with (perhaps Guardians of UFs could be a barb faction that the Elohim are at peace with), which would make it harder for other civs to nab the unique features, and mean that the Elohim don't need to rush

4. Changing the settler ability to an alternative build might be better (similiar to the austrin), that's a bit more expensive. Perhaps the cost of a settler + that of a monk, which would give 340 hammers, rather then 220. This will balance out the free monk, furthermore shouldn't it cost a bit more effort to settle far away rather then nearby? Or through some kind of trickery have the ability to not give free guards but instead give people you send with it(I imagine this is more difficult to code of course).

5. Maintain that all cities/whatever next to a UF have a free government center, but nothing else. Only the special settlement type above gets the free food/gold (though production is probably more balanced then gold).

6. Perhaps having to work to get a new pilgrimage would be more balanced. It's a powerful ability, and there should be some kind of payment.

My ideal balance this would result in is that there'll be a small nexus of settlement around the starting capital (about 3 or 4 cities), and after that the civ starts to spread out. From a lore perspective, this civ has just emerged from the age of Ice, so I think they'd need to get themselves a bit established before they have the logistics to set out on expeditions. They also shouldn't be as good at being spread out as the Austrin. Currently the Pilgrimage command is a no-brainer as you get a free 5 strength defender, which is pretty much enough to beat most barbarians beside Orthus (and even the 4 strength before philosophy is pretty good).

A good alternative would be to give the special unit 5 Defensive strength only(and maybe not be able to move from the city), which means that all the unit can do is stop the city from being immediately destroyed, not go out and establish control of the surroundings, so that it can be improved. Instead warriors must be used. This makes these cities slightly less potent, and makes it easier to keep the cities in existence, but harder to do more with them. At priesthood the units can still be upgraded to normal monks of course.

Now of course all this is up to yourself and how you want it to work. I'll play it a few more times and try to give more feedback. All this is a move in the right direction

 

[Pazyryk]

I'll definitely be toning down the Pilgrim's Tithe in a coming version. I'll remove the multiplier effect. Here's the idea I'm playing with: You can get food, production and/or commerce from the tithe, but the amount is reduced based on favorable tiles nearby. So a city by Yggsdrasil should get 0 food, and a city by Remnant of Patria should get 0 production. However, a city on total flatland ice can grow (at least a little) and have some production for defence.

Another idea is to let them only make settlers from their capital (or perhaps also cities connected to capital by trade network). This would prevent them from "growing a 2nd empire" somewhere far from the capital.

Edit: posted before I read your post above.

 

[DonQuigleone]

I'll definitely be toning down the Pilgrim's Tithe in a coming version. I'll remove the multiplier effect. Here's the idea I'm playing with: You can get food, production and/or commerce from the tithe, but the amount is reduced based on favorable tiles nearby. So a city by Yggsdrasil should get 0 food, and a city by Remnant of Patria should get 0 production. However, a city on total flatland ice can grow (at least a little) and have some production for defence.

Another idea is to let them only make settlers from their capital (or perhaps also cities connected to capital by trade network). This would prevent them from "growing a 2nd empire" somewhere far from the capital.

Edit: posted before I read your post above.

It'll take a while for you to get through all the above

Seems like a step in the right direction. I think an easier way to do would be to give bonus yields directly to the Unique feature tile itself. This will be simpler to manage, and also gives Elohim a further incentive to settle near them. Yggdrassil or Remnants of Patria would be the same, but something like Letum Frigus, or the Mirror of heaven could be given +4 food and +3 hammers, enough to get a city off the ground, but nothing too spectacular. Do note that most locations will always allow a city to grow to about size 3 or 4 , which is enough for most, food is the most needed, but production can be compensated for with specialists. Culture isn't usually needed as a tithe.

 

[Pazyryk]

Thanks for all the useful feedback!

1. I got one settler teleported to an Island near, but in no way able to get Aifon Isle in it's radius. I think perhaps sea features should be omitted, or at least this bug resolved.

It probably transported you to a place that "should" be in your 500 ring (4 tile radius). I'll reduce that to 3, which is pretty easy for the high-cultured Elohim to generate. (you only need the UF in your cultural borders, not fat cross, to get benefits)

2. UFs that are owned by other civs should be deprioritized.

It only does this if the UF is not in any city's fat cross. You can usually steal the tile from another civ given the Elohim's high culture generation (even from a capital).

3. The able to it with your initial settler may be too powerful, it essentially gives you a "reroll" off your start location.

But re-rolling is fun! (OK, I might remove this. It's frustrating though because my favorite map script almost never puts me near a UF.)

4. Perhaps delaying the ability to establish these outposts until either a certain technology or until you've established a beginning base of 3-4 cities(depending on size) might be better.

Removing the multiplier effect for UFs should reduce the strong incentive to always transport the settler. You can focus on some close cities first, or not. Your choice.

5. The fact you get a free strength 4 unit (who can be easily brought up to 5 and then to a monk) is very overpowered. You can essentially jut keep pumping out settlers with abandon, gaining cities with abandon, toning this down a bit would be good. Some greater loss would be good.

I'm loosing at least 1/2 of my new cities. Is this not true for others? This may depend a lot on map configuration. I originally had the Novice at base 4, with the pre-philosophy penalty bringing it to 3. In my experience, this lead to about 80% loss which was just too painful.

6. The losing 80% of gold from trade is pretty big, Trade is a huge segment of mid-to late game income, so Elohim might be fatefully weakened in late game.

Maybe, but the general consensus here seems to be that they are overpowered with the current Tithe system. The trade hit is supposed to counter balance the Tithe.

7. If you just use pilgrimages for all your initial cities you also have far lower maintenance further enabling booming behaviour.

No. The no-distance-to-capital costs is applied to ALL Elohim cities (at least currently; I might change this).

8. Perhaps teleporting next to a large stack of barbarians should be de-emphasized?

But you suggested above that the failure rate should be higher.

9. Usually you get placed 2 tiles away from the UF, perhaps the spot it chooses should be weighted to be 1 tile away (IE next to the UF, where possible)

This is partly to help the AI. Where you land is where the AI would be forced to found a city. That gives me 18 tiles to consider rather than 8, so the AI will get a better city location on average. (The human is free to move farther, which is sometimes a good idea. The Elohim can get to 3 ring culture radius pretty quickly and this counts for UF ownership.)

10. As a religious civ, it would be best to find a way to prevent religions being founded in the far off settlements, maybe favoring more established cities (this is an issue that might also effect the austrin).

If you're going for Order or Emp, you will also pop a priest in your capital. Probably worth sacrificing him to spread in your capital (you should be going for Priesthood anyway.)

11. Perhaps UFs closer to home should be prioritized over UFs on the other side of the world.

I'm not trying to sound obnoxious, but I actually had it the other way around in my first implementation. It's totally random now, which is a good compromise.

12. Perhaps UFs with higher yields (like Yggdrasil or Remnants of Patria), or "good" unique features(like Tomb of Sucellus as opposed to broken sepulcher) should also be prioritized.

I think they also have some role related to the "bad" ones. Not sure though.

13. Perhaps there should be some kind of delay from when you cast the spell and they arrive, maybe 5 -10 turns.

Is this a balancing suggestion or do you think there should be delay for some kind of "realism" reason?

I'll give a few alternative models of my own devising:

1. Cities established at UFs are less powerful: they only work the 1st ring, produce no great people (in many ways a positive) can produce settlers, but not sirona pilgrimages. Perhaps a more limited selection of buildings or culture. Don't produce any maintenance. Can be converted to a normal city if you like. More defensible and less of a burden on central administration, but produces less resources. From a flavour perspective this would also be in keeping with idea of small isolated monasteries all over. Not bustling cities!

2. If the ability to make these convoys is delayed, the exploitability of this will be lessened. However there are different arrangements:

i. All available at X time, simply switches on.

ii. Tied to development of religious buildings. Perhaps you gain 1 convoy for every abbey you own (note a abbey requires 4 shrines of sirona). If a pilgrimage city gets destroyed you get another one.

iii. Staggered by general civ size. Say you start with 1 available, then you get a second at size 4, a third at size 6 a fourth at size 8 and then infinite after that.

iv. You get Free settlements, staggered in some way, this means that you can expand from your initial base AND have no reason not to get settlements at the UFs

3. However if delayed until the early midgame this might result in all the UFs being taken by AI before you get any chance to found one of these. One way to handle this would be for the Unique features to all have guardians, which the Elohim could have an easier time dealing with (perhaps Guardians of UFs could be a barb faction that the Elohim are at peace with), which would make it harder for other civs to nab the unique features, and mean that the Elohim don't need to rush

4. Changing the settler ability to an alternative build might be better (similiar to the austrin), that's a bit more expensive. Perhaps the cost of a settler + that of a monk, which would give 340 hammers, rather then 220. This will balance out the free monk, furthermore shouldn't it cost a bit more effort to settle far away rather then nearby? Or through some kind of trickery have the ability to not give free guards but instead give people you send with it(I imagine this is more difficult to code of course).

5. Maintain that all cities/whatever next to a UF have a free government center, but nothing else. Only the special settlement type above gets the free food/gold (though production is probably more balanced then gold).

6. Perhaps having to work to get a new pilgrimage would be more balanced. It's a powerful ability, and there should be some kind of payment.

My ideal balance this would result in is that there'll be a small nexus of settlement around the starting capital (about 3 or 4 cities), and after that the civ starts to spread out. From a lore perspective, this civ has just emerged from the age of Ice, so I think they'd need to get themselves a bit established before they have the logistics to set out on expeditions. They also shouldn't be as good at being spread out as the Austrin. Currently the Pilgrimage command is a no-brainer as you get a free 5 strength defender, which is pretty much enough to beat most barbarians beside Orthus (and even the 4 strength before philosophy is pretty good).

A good alternative would be to give the special unit 5 Defensive strength only(and maybe not be able to move from the city), which means that all the unit can do is stop the city from being immediately destroyed, not go out and establish control of the surroundings, so that it can be improved. Instead warriors must be used. This makes these cities slightly less potent, and makes it easier to keep the cities in existence, but harder to do more with them. At priesthood the units can still be upgraded to normal monks of course.

Now of course all this is up to yourself and how you want it to work. I'll play it a few more times and try to give more feedback. All this is a move in the right direction

I'll think about it. I'm kind of stuck on the idea that these should be real full fledged cities and not "outposts." I'm not sure why I feel this way.

 

[Pazyryk]

Here's the new Pilgrim's Tithe system I'm working on. It's in and seems to be working, but I need to test a little more. I'll release tomorrow if all goes well. Some more changes coming too.

Pilgrim’s Tithe may come in the form of food, production, and/or commerce. Generally speaking, well-developed cities will see all Tithe in the form of added commerce. However, new cities will receive all Tithe in the form of food and production. The distribution between food and production (and the shift to commerce) is gradual and depends on city size relative to potential and current yield levels (i.e., what is lacking?). A typical city with population 5 and good terrain development will probably only see commerce. However, a city in the arctic may always see Tithe in the form of food support. Tithe levels for any yield type never change more than 1 per turn, so you never see wild swings in response to changing conditions (and it's slow to get going in a new city).

First, a single number (total tithe) is calculated for each city:

UF ownership (defined below*): +10

Reliquary: double UF effect and +2

Culture: current rate per turn / 10, but only to a maximum of +5 to the total tithe

However, total tithe in any city cannot exceed the total number of all your city’s population points / 2.

Total tithe is then distributed between the three yield types so that the total number of plus plus equals the total. The formula is complicated but it takes into account city size (relative to happy limit) and current food and production yield. It's a very gradual change (not even close to one-to-one) so I don't think you can exploit it (e.g., by not working production tiles to get more production from tithe). Since commerce is generally considered inferior (on a one-for-one comparison), the mechanism favors early cities or cities in very inhospitable locations over well-developed cities.

This means that your initial city will see almost none, but cities founded late in the game may get to high levels (e.g., +10, +10) in only 10 turns if they are near a UF and rush buy a reliquary. Big developed cities near a UF may see up to +27 . The latter number is probably close to the amount lost to reduced commerce from normal trade.

*A single UF can only be owned by one city. Otherwise, a city "owns" a UF if it is either: 1) within cultural borders and closest to that city, or 2) in the city’s fat-cross even if it is outside of cultural borders. A UF may even be considered owned by a city (for the purposes of Tithe) if it is in the city’s fat cross but within another civ’s cultural borders, as long as you have open borders agreement with that civ.

 

[esvath]

Wow! I never thought you would finish this soon!

I have not played it yet, but here is my 2cent:

Also I think it may be better for the Elohim to be more of a "central empire with branches at UFs" rather then entirely spread out, so perhaps a mechanism whereby you need a certain number of cities to get a pilgrimage would work out well.

Obviously different ways work differently, what I'd like to see, that would be interesting would be perhaps instead of cities everywhere, many nodes of cities, IE the city at the UF at the center with satellite cities. This would make for interesting gameplay, I think.

I think this is the appropriate Elohim for Age of Rebirth, as what Valkrionn also has said. Thus, I agree with the pilgrimage needs 3-4 city OR require Mysticism. Thus, the Elohim would have a centralized base before doing pilgrimage.

Another way to get such cities to prosper would be to mod all the unique features to provide bonus resources on the tile, or perhaps only to the Elohim.

Yggdrassil or Remnants of Patria would be the same, but something like Letum Frigus, or the Mirror of heaven could be given +4 food and +3 hammers

How about Novice's unique spell : Hallowing Land (or something?)
Instead exploring lair (and other UF), this "destroy" the lair (and UF) and place Elohim's version of lair (and UF) which grant yield?
example : Hallowing Land casted on Pyre of Seraphic, destroy the Pyre and add IMPROVEMENT_PYRE_ELOHIM, which graphically and functionally do the same as the original Pyre but give some yield.
Of course, this give a balance problem : if the city was taken by other civs, should the yield remains or should a python check remove the IMPROVEMENT_PYRE_ELOHIM and replace it with original Pyre?

5. The fact you get a free strength 4 unit (who can be easily brought up to 5 and then to a monk) is very overpowered. You can essentially just keep pumping out settlers with abandon, gaining cities without doling out any military support, toning this down a bit would be good.

How about giving the Novice a spell : Guard the Shrine?
This will give promotion which zero-ed , +100% defense and several other bonuses. The promotion enable another spell : Unguard (or something better ) which remove the promotion (makes the Novice able to move again but remove any bonuses)?

4. Changing the settler ability to an alternative build might be better (similiar to the austrin), that's a bit more expensive. Perhaps the cost of a settler + that of a monk, which would give 340 hammers, rather then 220. This will balance out the free monk, furthermore shouldn't it cost a bit more effort to settle far away rather then nearby?

I agree.

How about Elohim UU "Pilgrim" which able to use the "Pilgrimage" spell and placed in UF? Then whenever the Pilgrim build a city, a Novice spawn and Pilgrim Tithe is built in the city. So, when normal Settler build a city, it won't spawn Novice and the city is built without Tithe. (I don't know whether this is possible or not to code, though...)

Then, using Tithe building, you can block the city from building several building, such as Money Changer, Theathre, etc, etc, which basically not fit into a remote city. BUT, the Tithe also unlock several new buildings to ensure the Pilgrim city survivability.

edit : wrote this before saw your post

 

[DonQuigleone]

It probably transported you to a place that "should" be in your 500 ring (4 tile radius). I'll reduce that to 3, which is pretty easy for the high-cultured Elohim to generate. (you only need the UF in your cultural borders, not fat cross, to get benefits)

I think it might be best if it only counted if it was within the fat cross, I'm not sure on it though.

It only does this if the UF is not in any city's fat cross. You can usually steal the tile from another civ given the Elohim's high culture generation (even from a capital).

I don't think the Elohim are significantly more able then other civs at gaining culture. Also I think it would be more appropriate for Unique features in unoccupied regions to be more of a priority, in addition the tithe is directly tied to having the UF in it's borders, and so you won't even get the tithe to help you off the ground, also the ability of a city to catch up with another player's capital is quite low. Stealing territory doesn't really fit the Elohim to me.

But re-rolling is fun! (OK, I might remove this. It's frustrating though because my favorite map script almost never puts me near a UF.)

I usually use ErebusContinent and get a good location, however it all varies. However a free reroll is very difficult to balance, especially in MP.

Removing the multiplier effect for UFs should reduce the strong incentive to always transport the settler. You can focus on some close cities first, or not. Your choice.

The free defender is a much bigger buff. You don't get that when founding a normal city...

I'm loosing at least 1/2 of my new cities. Is this not true for others? This may depend a lot on map configuration. I originally had the Novice at base 4, with the pre-philosophy penalty bringing it to 3. In my experience, this lead to about 80% loss which was just too painful.

This is true, but it's very much down to luck, if you manage to get the city over the first few turns, it usually will stick around. Personally I would make it easier in the immediate after founding (by perhaps getting rid of the initial enemies in the vicinity or maybe giving the defender an initial bonus to defense...). Certainly a defender is needed, but what form he should take has to be considered.

Maybe, but the general consensus here seems to be that they are overpowered with the current Tithe system. The trade hit is supposed to counter balance the Tithe.

Perhaps so, but I think messing too much with the existing balance will make things too complicated. Better to maintain the existing trade relationships (these cities should be able to trade with neighbouring foreign cities, after all, and they can get their gold from there).

No. The no-distance-to-capital costs is applied to ALL Elohim cities (at least currently; I might change this).

I agree it should be changed. For one thing the Austrin already have this, and we don't want the Elohim to be another version of them.

But you suggested above that the failure rate should be higher.

Not so, Personally I never like losing cities so a lower failure rate would be fine by me. I think higher costs, less potency, combined with a lower failure rate would be better.

This is partly to help the AI. Where you land is where the AI would be forced to found a city. That gives me 18 tiles to consider rather than 8, so the AI will get a better city location on average. (The human is free to move farther, which is sometimes a good idea. The Elohim can get to 3 ring culture radius pretty quickly and this counts for UF ownership.)

True, but keeping the city closer to the UF might be better, even more so for the AI who often leave off on culture generation (and will need the tithe more)

If you're going for Order or Emp, you will also pop a priest in your capital. Probably worth sacrificing him to spread in your capital (you should be going for Priesthood anyway.)

Yes, but holy cities are too important to be in some burg about to get smashed by Orthus!

Is this a balancing suggestion or do you think there should be delay for some kind of "realism" reason?

Both, most cities have a 3 or 4 turn lag between settler completion and founding of the city. However this could be too difficult to code, or not worth the effort.

I'll think about it. I'm kind of stuck on the idea that these should be real full fledged cities and not "outposts." I'm not sure why I feel this way.

I prefer the feel of outposts (which can morph into cities later...), but it's up to you.

As for the exact form of the tithe, personally I think it's enough to give Elohim a bonus income on certain Unique Features, this would be a very simple thing to implement. Also gives incentive to settle closer to the Unique Feature(to actually guard it from outsiders).