Will games without the latest expansion ever receive proper balancing?

679x

Warlord
Joined
Mar 30, 2017
Messages
289
I have the Rise and Fall expansion, and this is something I've noticed happening now that another expansion has come out and I haven't purchased it - some things in-game are unbalanced, but patches only fix the issue if you bought the latest expansion. This is starting to concern me. We paid for the game, and game-balancing shouldn't be DLC-exclusive. It's also important to note that many balance changes were made that were needed in all versions, but only apply to those with Gathering Storm.

For example, last patch, pillaging was nerfed so that it can no longer give science or culture when you pillage improvements. In the patch summary video, they stated that they knew how that would negatively affect Norway, whose economy is meant to be based on pillaging, so they added a buff to their ability that would allow them to still get culture and science from pillaging. The pillage nerf affected all versions, which was good, but the Norway buff only worked in Gathering Storm. Why? I see no reason why they didn't update Norway in other versions, too. Norway is a vanilla civ, and the change that warranted a Norway buff worked without expansions, so why didn't the buff work without expansions, too?

Unfortunately, this is a trend that has continued into the June 2019 patch. They removed the Goddess of the Harvest pantheon, widely considered to be OP in combination with the Rise and Fall expansion's governor Magnus, but they only removed it in Gathering Storm when R&F suffered the same unbalance.

Judging by the latest patch notes, where the listed changes only apply to Gathering Storm unless stated otherwise, there seem to be many other instances of this: great works of writing having altered culture/tourism values, extra GPPs being converted to faith after you can't get that great person anymore, building production cost reductions, yield buffs in later-game buildings to make constructing them worthwhile, pantheon rebalances, tech/civic cost increases, changes to the interactions between battering rams/siege towers/tier 2 or 3 walls... Quite a few. Are any of those changes only necessary in certain expansions due to unbalancing caused by the new features in said expansion? Maybe, maybe some of those are only warranted in a certain expansion. But surely not all of them.

I really hope that they make a change in this regard. It really disappoints me that they seem to be letting some players fall behind just because they didn't buy the newest packs. I dare say it's a bit of a blight on the quality of the game, particularly if it continues.
 
The base game and R&F both got balance patches after release. I don't think we can expect more than that after each major release. Also, I expect it would complicate testing quite a bit to make changes to the base game or R&F, as all the rulesets would have to be play tested, not just the latest.
 
I see again and again that they have severely limited resources to implement, debug and balance all the ambitious amount of complicated & complex content envisaged already. So I expect them to concentrate their efforts on the "main version" down the road 'til the complete edition incl. final patch (to achieve the most bang for the buck aka satisfy the largest number of players).

Civ1 & civ2 were different (1 had no extension at all, 2's extensions were a motley hotchpotch), as nobody knew back then to what "CIV" would lead.
But iirc civ3 had the Research Lab (science level 3 building since civ1) "missing" in the vanilla release (purposely). And since then _for me_ the 'complete edition' is the actual game, just with 2 major milestones at vanilla & at 1EXP release.

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Introducing balance changes with expansions is also a standard industry practice for incentivizing purchases.
 
I'm also stuck in the past. I was hoping the improvement changes would at least apply but oh well.

I fired up a game after the patch and everyone is behaving weirdly. I've been going slow with Kongo on prince. I'm coming up on Renaissance techs after fleshing the medieval techs pretty well (no sailing or other top stuff) and all my opponents are at three cities each and don't seem to be generating a single GPP. I might add that I don't have campuses in any cities so my research isn't great. I also had a literal army of barbarians walk up to a completely undefended and unwalled city and just hang around until I moved my own units there and picked them off. Same thing with Ghandi, he shot me but never engaged in melee warfare despite me leaving models on a couple of HP in bad spots. I haven't played in a while, maybe this is just standard prince AI? The pillaging changes seem to have gone through though.
 
In the patch notes, anything marked "ALL RULESETS ON PC" means it applies to base and Rise & Fall as well as Gathering Storm.
 
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