Hello everyone.
I have some not-that-well-thought ideas I'd like to share. It will help me make them clearer for myself, and I hope that maybe some of you will tell me why they suck. I'm sorry if they have been proposed before, I looked a bit but couldn't find anything.
What to do with the social policies tree in a FFH-like mod
The SP tree could be used for magic. Culture would only serve to expand your cities. The SP trees would be unlocked using magic points (magic "power", magic "knowledge", magic "awareness" or whatever).
This would give culture a clearer purpose.
This would allow civilizations to be more focused. If we take the vanilla model, the more science you have, the more science you gain. This means that being technologically or magically advanced is similar. Indeed, if magic is unlocked through the tech tree and if technology costs are greater and greater along the tree, then a technologically advanced civilization can learn magic in no time. I don't like this, and I'd prefer if magically advanced civilizations used their magic to replace science somehow. This is why I propose this idea.
Then, each tree would be a magic category (elemental, necromancy and so on). I don't think any era condition is needed.
Of course, this would mean that we would lose the SP mechanism. I'm not sure it is too bad; I think magic can have more impact, both on gameplay and on immersion.
The cost of SP (or "Magic Policies") would not go higher with your number of cities, of course.
Add improvements to help city specialization
Right know it seems that trading posts are never a bad choice, if not the only good choice. This is a bit sad. It's ok to ease micromanagement, but maybe not if it comes at the cost of city specialization.
There would be an improvement which would provide science. There is already a gold improvement. There would be a culture improvement. Workshops would be back for hammers. In the context of my first idea, there would be a magic improvement to provide magic knowledge points.
Then we have to choose the places where these improvements can be built or are the most effective. For instance, a culture improvement would be great on hills, to enjoy the view or something. Tundra, being cold, can help with some science experiments. These constraints have to be chosen with great care. The way to choose these constraints is as follows.
1) Find out how many cities would be needed for each category. For instance, hammers are important, but one or two cities is enough to pump military units. However, you can never run out of gold and science.
2) Decide, according to lore, which kinds of land will be appropriate for each specialization.
3) Balance the map generator to have about the right number of land kinds for each specialization. For instance, if we decided that we needed about 20% hammer cities and 80% science, and if hammers are produced by mines on hills and science is produced in tundra, then your world should look about 80% tundra with the rest being some grouped-together patches of hills.
4) If this landscape looks silly (it depends on the context of the mod, but for a realist world 80% tundra is silly), rethink step 2.
City state balance
Giving gold to city state seems a little overpowered. I'm pretty sure these tweaks must have been proposed already so I'll be quick.
1) The food bonus should not scale. The best would be to be able to choose the city which would profit from the bonus, but I don't know if it is technically feasible. Else, maybe each city would receive like 10/n food, where n is your total number of cities. The game seems to handle floats all right, so it should be fine.
2) The bribing prices should start lower (maybe like 1/2 of the current prices) and would rise with the city state technology to end, say, at 5 times the current prices. Or instead of the city state science, any other number, for instance its gold production, could be used. Gold production is interesting because it would mean that some city states would need more gold than others, and that you could attack a city state to lower its gold production and then your ally can give gold to the CS for more profit.
I'm not even sure the food bonus, the culture bonus and the unit bonus are needed. They only mean that the trading post spam strategy is stronger and that you don't have to thing about your economy too much beside gold production. So maybe what could be done is to only keep the following bonuses:
- resource bonuses;
- war participation;
- being able to go through their land when friendly, and view it when allied;
- science bonus and great persons with the right social policies;
and then balance prices to take into account the nerf of the CS.
Moreover, right now diplomacy win feels like an economy win, which is the role normally played by the science win. Something's wrong here. These ideas would help because diplomacy wins would be harder, but that's not enough.
That's all, folks
That's all for now. I'm sorry, this post is not very well written. I hope that's not too bad... On the other hand, the forum has been saying this to me for a while:
I have some not-that-well-thought ideas I'd like to share. It will help me make them clearer for myself, and I hope that maybe some of you will tell me why they suck. I'm sorry if they have been proposed before, I looked a bit but couldn't find anything.
What to do with the social policies tree in a FFH-like mod
The SP tree could be used for magic. Culture would only serve to expand your cities. The SP trees would be unlocked using magic points (magic "power", magic "knowledge", magic "awareness" or whatever).
This would give culture a clearer purpose.
This would allow civilizations to be more focused. If we take the vanilla model, the more science you have, the more science you gain. This means that being technologically or magically advanced is similar. Indeed, if magic is unlocked through the tech tree and if technology costs are greater and greater along the tree, then a technologically advanced civilization can learn magic in no time. I don't like this, and I'd prefer if magically advanced civilizations used their magic to replace science somehow. This is why I propose this idea.
Then, each tree would be a magic category (elemental, necromancy and so on). I don't think any era condition is needed.
Of course, this would mean that we would lose the SP mechanism. I'm not sure it is too bad; I think magic can have more impact, both on gameplay and on immersion.
The cost of SP (or "Magic Policies") would not go higher with your number of cities, of course.
Add improvements to help city specialization
Right know it seems that trading posts are never a bad choice, if not the only good choice. This is a bit sad. It's ok to ease micromanagement, but maybe not if it comes at the cost of city specialization.
There would be an improvement which would provide science. There is already a gold improvement. There would be a culture improvement. Workshops would be back for hammers. In the context of my first idea, there would be a magic improvement to provide magic knowledge points.
Then we have to choose the places where these improvements can be built or are the most effective. For instance, a culture improvement would be great on hills, to enjoy the view or something. Tundra, being cold, can help with some science experiments. These constraints have to be chosen with great care. The way to choose these constraints is as follows.
1) Find out how many cities would be needed for each category. For instance, hammers are important, but one or two cities is enough to pump military units. However, you can never run out of gold and science.
2) Decide, according to lore, which kinds of land will be appropriate for each specialization.
3) Balance the map generator to have about the right number of land kinds for each specialization. For instance, if we decided that we needed about 20% hammer cities and 80% science, and if hammers are produced by mines on hills and science is produced in tundra, then your world should look about 80% tundra with the rest being some grouped-together patches of hills.
4) If this landscape looks silly (it depends on the context of the mod, but for a realist world 80% tundra is silly), rethink step 2.
City state balance
Giving gold to city state seems a little overpowered. I'm pretty sure these tweaks must have been proposed already so I'll be quick.
1) The food bonus should not scale. The best would be to be able to choose the city which would profit from the bonus, but I don't know if it is technically feasible. Else, maybe each city would receive like 10/n food, where n is your total number of cities. The game seems to handle floats all right, so it should be fine.
2) The bribing prices should start lower (maybe like 1/2 of the current prices) and would rise with the city state technology to end, say, at 5 times the current prices. Or instead of the city state science, any other number, for instance its gold production, could be used. Gold production is interesting because it would mean that some city states would need more gold than others, and that you could attack a city state to lower its gold production and then your ally can give gold to the CS for more profit.
I'm not even sure the food bonus, the culture bonus and the unit bonus are needed. They only mean that the trading post spam strategy is stronger and that you don't have to thing about your economy too much beside gold production. So maybe what could be done is to only keep the following bonuses:
- resource bonuses;
- war participation;
- being able to go through their land when friendly, and view it when allied;
- science bonus and great persons with the right social policies;
and then balance prices to take into account the nerf of the CS.
Moreover, right now diplomacy win feels like an economy win, which is the role normally played by the science win. Something's wrong here. These ideas would help because diplomacy wins would be harder, but that's not enough.
That's all, folks
That's all for now. I'm sorry, this post is not very well written. I hope that's not too bad... On the other hand, the forum has been saying this to me for a while:
So hey, I have an excuse
