[Vote] (2-52) Proposal: Cooldown between unit purchases

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In practice this sounds like an insanely big nerf to small empires that can mostly be ignored by larger empires. You're taking the largest complaint / weakness with Tradition and supercharging it.
If you give mercenary units a significant benefit to cooldown reduction over normal units, you will just create even more dominance for those units and for authority play.
 
In practice this sounds like an insanely big nerf to small empires that can mostly be ignored by larger empires. You're taking the largest complaint / weakness with Tradition and supercharging it.
If you give mercenary units a significant benefit to cooldown reduction over normal units, you will just create even more dominance for those units and for authority play.
Germany and Spain would also need adjustments as well, with their ability to mass buy units. Now generally I am not in the camp that holds up changes for a few civs, I always think civs can be tweaked. But tweaks you would need.
 
Well, it's either this with nerfing high level promotions or dealing with carpets of units to balance it out. Some may say that dealing with carpets of units is tedious and kills fun. It's subjective which is better.

Surely there are other options?

Recent changes (on deity at least) have really cut down on AI unit carpets. They have far less units than they used to, so whatever was changed clearly is having an effect. I'm not sure exactly what caused it but reducing units numbers clearly is possible.
 
I'm not sure exactly what caused it but reducing units numbers clearly is possible.
AI lost their ABC production bonuses in 3.0, that is the key difference.

Its also probably yet another reason that making these changes is a bad idea. I think it takes time for people to change their thinking. Case in point, I have long thought mastery was pretty bad, based on versions of it in the past where it was weaker.

It wasn't until I sat down and went through a playthrough that CrazyG posted where we actually looked at the value and I realized....I was flat out wrong.


If people still think the AI has unit numbers like it had before 3.0....they're wrong. A LOT has changed recently.
 
Surely there are other options?

Recent changes (on deity at least) have really cut down on AI unit carpets. They have far less units than they used to, so whatever was changed clearly is having an effect. I'm not sure exactly what caused it but reducing units numbers clearly is possible.
AI lost their ABC production bonuses in 3.0, that is the key difference.

Its also probably yet another reason that making these changes is a bad idea. I think it takes time for people to change their thinking. Case in point, I have long thought mastery was pretty bad, based on versions of it in the past where it was weaker.

It wasn't until I sat down and went through a playthrough that CrazyG posted where we actually looked at the value and I realized....I was flat out wrong.


If people still think the AI has unit numbers like it had before 3.0....they're wrong. A LOT has changed recently.
I can vouch for these two. I've been on wars in which the AI took constant military losses and is unable to recover from them. The AI is about on par with a human in unit production after patch 3.0.0 dropped and isn't able to flood the battlefield as it used to.

I'd say that there are three changes that made it possible:
  1. ABC yields from handicap no longer include production.
  2. Unit upgrade costs no longer triple dip between "AIUnitUpgradePercent", "AITrainPercent" and "AIPerEraModifier". The AI now has to dedicate serious effort towards upgrading units.
  3. Skirmisher change as a flanking support unit.
The first two are simple, the AI is no longer running out of buildings to work on due to excess production and minimal gold costs, so unit production isn't the default for the AI anymore. Maintaining a proper military force is now about as costly for them as it is for a human. The third one is because the new skirmisher rewards aggressive play and makes it much easier to finish enemy units, which a human is well capable to exploit. So, the AI is taking heavier losses and is struggling to recover from them fast enough.
 
Maybe the amount of free XP the AI get should scale with era? That could be used to keep them competitive even if the number of units is lower. Also maybe people will flip on promotions if they're on the receiving end more frequently.

I've mentioned this in several threads, but going to continue to throw in against it everywhere I see it proposed. We should not make AI / Human only changes ever.
 
In practice this sounds like an insanely big nerf to small empires that can mostly be ignored by larger empires. You're taking the largest complaint / weakness with Tradition and supercharging it.
If you give mercenary units a significant benefit to cooldown reduction over normal units, you will just create even more dominance for those units and for authority play.
This is actually very easily solved. Mercenaries should not be locked behind Authority. It makes no sense historically, and I've played this way for years. I make 2 changes as well: merc units are unable to upgrade and cost +1 maintenance. Also helps control some of the promotion stacking from "buy merc unit, upgrade to UU => super unit secured".
 
Again, inspired by the unit spam discussion.

Make it so that you have to wait 5 turns between combat unit purchases in the same city.

Modification to the duration possible based on policies etc but let's postpone that discussion and start with a flat 5 turns (on standard speed).

Exception for "mercenaries" like free company etc, which is an indirect buff.

Edit: Clarified that it's about combat units.
I think there is a simpler solution. 0 XP from purchased units, and then change the Freedom policy to give +50%

This is a strong disincentive to the human player that is always min-maxing, and AI units will be quicker to delete with extreme prejudice.
 
I've mentioned this in several threads, but going to continue to throw in against it everywhere I see it proposed. We should not make AI / Human only changes ever.
There are plenty of such changes anyway. All difficulty are made mainly of these.
 
Proposal sponsored by Legen.
 
Maybe units should die / be damaged more easily rather than preventing the spam of hard-to-kill units
 
Maybe units should die / be damaged more easily rather than preventing the spam of hard-to-kill units
Yes, by lowering the HP of the units to 70 or 80 for example, there would be fewer over-promoted units among the players and the fights would perhaps be easier for the AI.
 
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